The Nest of the Sparrowhawk eBook

The murderer was powerful, and there is a strength
which madness gives. Heavy boulders pushed by
vigorous arms had to help in the monstrous deed!

Heavy boulders thrown and rolled over the face of
the dead, so as to obliterate all identity!

Nay! had a sound now disturbed the silence of this
awesome night, surely it had been the laughter of
demons aghast at such a deed!

The moon indeed hid her face, retreating once more
behind the veils of mist. The breeze itself was
lulled and the fog gathered itself together and wrapped
the unavowable horrors of the night in a gray and ghoul-like
shroud.

Madness lurked in the eyes of the sacrilegious murderer.
Madness which helped him not only to carry his grim
task to the end, but, having accomplished it, to see
that it was well done.

And his hand did not tremble, as he raised the lantern
and looked down on that which had once been
Adam Lambert, the smith.

Nay, had those laughing demons looked on it, they
would have veiled their faces in awe!

The gentle wavelets of the torpid tide were creeping
round that thing in red doublet and breeches, in high
top boots, lace cuffs and collar.

Sir Marmaduke looked down calmly upon his work, and
did not even shudder with horror.

Madness had been upon him and had numbed his brain.

But the elemental instinct of self-preservation whispered
to him that his work was well done.

When the sea gave up the dead, only the clothes, the
doublet, the ribands, the lace, the black shade, mayhap,
would reveal his identity, as the mysterious French
prince who for a brief while had lodged in a cottage
at Acol.

But the face was unrecognizable.

PART IV

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE DAY AFTER

The feeling which prevailed in Thanet with regard
to the murder of the mysterious foreigner on the sands
of Epple Bay was chiefly one of sullen resentment.

Here was a man who had come from goodness knows where,
whose strange wanderings and secret appearances in
the neighborhood had oft roused the anger of the village
folk, just as his fantastic clothes, his silken doublet
and befrilled shirt had excited their scorn; here was
a man, I say, who came from nowhere, and now he chose—­the
yokels of the neighborhood declared it that he chose—­to
make his exit from the world in as weird a manner
as he had effected his entrance into this remote and
law-abiding little island.

The farmhands and laborers who dwelt in the cottages
dotted about around St. Nicholas-at-Wade, Epple or
Acol were really angry with the stranger for allowing
himself to be murdered on their shores. Thanet
itself had up to now enjoyed a fair reputation for
orderliness and temperance, and that one of her inhabitants
should have been tempted to do away with that interloping
foreigner in such a violent manner was obviously the
fault of that foreigner himself.